Hi, time for a little bit larger update to the demo. I have recently finished the control group feature of the game and thought there was no good reason to not include that in the demo as it could give you a few more ways of playing the game while you wait for the full version. In addition I thought I might as well add leaderboards for speed running since I wanted to have some sort of leaderboard for the full game as well. So this update also include two leaderboards for those who want to maximize efficiency and compete.
There are also a few bug fixes and some tweaks to a few of the upgrades costs in the game that you can read about in the full patch notes below. But first I'll explain the control groups and new leaderboards in more detail.
Starting with the control groups. The control groups allows you to group moose together by selecting them and pressing the create control group button. Then you get a button at the bottom left of the screen that when pressed selects all the moose in that group. This can be useful if you have certain moose you want to upgrade separately from the rest of them. In addition each control group have a flag that you can place in the world. When placed the flag will show an area that any moose in the control group will mine inside. The area can be resized as well. So if there are some rare gems you really want to get to quickly you can set a control group flag for that area and the moose will work their way deeper into that specific area.
Then we have leaderboards. I have added two leaderboards that will be exclusive for the demo due to their nature. The first one is for mining to the north demo wall in the shortest time. So as soon as you mine the last gem before the wall in a column the time will be recorded and uploaded to the leaderboard. If you have one of the top 100 best times then you will appear in the leaderboard that can be reached from the main menu. The second leaderboard is for clearing the full demo area in the shortest time. So get your strategies ready and optimize your starting build orders to claim the top spots in the leaderboard. To keep track of your current time there is a clock button at the top right of the screen that you can press to see the current time of your save.
An extra tip for the ones reading all the text in this update post: Each save of the game has a different seed, so you can reset the game from the main menu until you get a seed that looks good, for example that has a good amount of gold ores close enough for early mining.
The rest of the patch notes follows below:
Features/Improvements
- Added control groups. See description earlier in the post
- Added speed running leaderboards. More details earlier in the post
- Added timer showing time played this save
- Added tooltips to upgrade buttons showing how many things will be upgraded
- Added expected sell value to the storage minecart info card
- Navigation buttons now unlock if moving the camera away from the base
- Added option to go to main menu in pause screen
Balance changes
- Increased cost scaling of saw speed upgrade
- Reduced cost scaling of miner capacity upgrade
- Reduced cost scaling of minecart speed upgrade
- Reduced cost scaling of rail length upgrade
- Made storage minecart upgrades unlock earlier
Bug fixes
- Fixed rare gems being more common than intended
- Fixed a bug causing the minecarts to not animate in when buying the first rails in a column
- Fixed a bug causing the moose to not go to a collection point if mining too far away from the base
- Fixed a bug casing moose to sometimes get stuck in the air